Is vac purging always necessary?

[_DankOpiAmp_]

I watched a YouTube video from reddit the other day and was wondering if it is always required. The individual in the video seemed to have perfectly double boiled and air dried it so that it barely changed after vacuum purging. The shatter was hard to stick together without heating pre- purge. It would also crack into chips/shards when scraped ( like its namesake?!)

It seems that uncontaminated butane's only health risk is the displacement of oxygen (which can lead to asphyxia), but this would only be possible if you were inhaling the vapour without oxygen. Its chemical hazard sheet seems to indicate that is is not "toxic" in the traditional sense and the properly boiled/aired out shatter seemed to have minimal butane residue anyway.

The collection Pyrex dish was quite large for the yield so the increased surface area from being so thinned out may have allowed more butane to evapourate. The shatter had be double boiled for an hour then left of to dry for 14 hours.

 

[thujone]

when it sticks to your fingers so bad you need to fetch some other solvent to take it off, it's ready to toke

 

[DaDankyDank]

Shatter doesn't mean it's fully purged, it's just a consistency.

Unless it gets put into a vaccuum at -25-27hg you'll have residuals. Will they kill you? Most likely not. Do we know the long term effects of ingesting butane at high ppm? Not really. We know butane is Neurotoxic though, so consistent exposure probably isn't smart.

Commercial “butane” is actually a mixture of many different isomers of butanes and pentanes and sometimes also propanes and hexanes. It's an extremely dirty gas, even when you have "14x refined" or whatever because of where it comes from. Butane, propane, and other hydrocarbons (pentane, hexane, etc.) in particular, are all derived from petroleum. Petroleum extracted from the ground is a mixture of thousands of compounds. Refineries separate them into groups according to their boiling points. It gets expensive to separate the compounds that have similar boiling points into high purity, so gas mixtures are sold as a single product. As the sources of crude oil change, the impurities present in the mixtures will change significantly.

Neopentane and Methylbutane both are common residual contaminants from canned butane extraction. Because of their higher molecular weight, both are less volatile than butane. Because of this, it is more difficult to purge these substances than butane. Heat won't boil them off - unless you want to cook the shit out of your oil and destroy all the terpenes and decarb your product.

Many people now running closed loop distill their butane to get rid of all these nasty molecules.

Pursue at your own risk. I'd say it's worth investing in a cheap vac like the easy vac pro or something if you plan to run more material in the future.

We all lived through the water/hotplate/vac seal/shitty handvac mason jar purges as far as I know, and people have smoked a ton of it but who knows what the long term effects are. I was guilty of it myself several years ago and I'm still alive so... yeah lol

 

[_DankOpiAmp_]

Thanks for the info! In regards to the toxicity though, for butane at least, it seems to only be "toxic" in the sense that is displaces oxygen. If you have information suggesting otherwise I would love to see it, lest I tax my neurons further unnecessarily in the event that this is attempted.

By decarb do you be decarboxylation that denatures the THC? One would certainly wants to avoid that. The fragment turpinoids I could live without lol.

 

[szuko000]

I have nothing too relevant to post other then what my father said to me "the lengths you guys go to just smoke a little weed is crazy" Personally I do like the progress seen in this field as this allows for a better understanding of the constituents of marijuana and the forms that THC and its analogs take. Out of everything from the legalization movement this whole better extraction and more refined product is something that i can get into lol never really cared about the differences in plants but this stuff i can read about

 

[Mafioso]

Thanks for the info! In regards to the toxicity though, for butane at least, it seems to only be "toxic" in the sense that is displaces oxygen. If you have information suggesting otherwise I would love to see it, lest I tax my neurons further unnecessarily in the event that this is attempted.

By decarb do you be decarboxylation that denatures the THC? One would certainly wants to avoid that. The fragment turpinoids I could live without lol.

I think it depends on who you ask, but yeah I am just as curious about butane and its neurotoxicity. I think the majority of oil makers desire a clean, solvent-free product but in terms of the toxicity of butane, it depends on who you ask. For example, one prominent oil maker as well as manufacturer of extraction tanks, claims that low levels of butane is nothing to worry about and that many cooking sprays such as PAM contain propellants such as butane. These sprays meet FDA and USDA guidelines... of course IME that doesn't mean too much other than it won't immediately kill you.

 

[DaDankyDank]

Again, this is at high concentrations. All the different labs who test extracts across the county all have their different standards. I don't really have a number on how much is safe to consume, but we definitely ingest these hydrocarbons all the time at low concentrations like Mafioso said.

IMO your product is going to be fine on your body in the short term, but who knows what's going to happen down the road. With these hydrocarbon extractions really becoming popular in the past decade or so (even though they've been around since the early 90s) I wonder what will happen with our generation with all the butane we consume lol. For all I know these residuals are free radicals that hang around for a long time and cause cancer or really fuck us up over time, but who knows. I'd hate to give a definitive answer that it's safe when I really don't know. I just think long term exposure even at low concentrations can't be good for us.